One reason Republican elders are futilely
pounding on Mitch Daniels's door at this late date is Mitt Romney. The other is Rick Santorum. To the elders, each man appears to be parading around with a big "L" for loser-in-November engraved on his forehead.
For Santorum, it's a matter of being able to persuade people that the positions he has been espousing in the campaign so far don't mark him as outside even the mainstream of an ever-more-rightward party on issues of abortion, birth control, women's role in society, environmental matters including climate change and his recent two-steps-forward, one-step-back comments regarding who, including the president of the United States, is and is not truly a Christian. In other words, he speaks for the hard-core, right-wing, evangelical base, but getting more "moderate" Republicans on board with his candidacy in the general election, not to mention independents and conservative Democrats, is where he faces big problems.
For Romney, it's the opposite problem. Ginning up Republican enthusiasm come November if he should get the nomination, which most analysts still believe to be the most likely outcome of the primary contest, could be difficult, to say the least.
It's hard to know what Romney actually believes beyond I-deserve-to-be-president given his insatiable appetite for flip-flops both in what he says and in policies he actually supported when he was governor of Massachusetts. As we have seen, the base, Republicans who have been giving a surge of support for Santorum, are deeply suspicious of Romney's conservative "principles." and seem to worry that he would move much too far in not just seeking those moderate Republican, independent and conservative voters, but actually bending on policy once he was in office.
Even Republicans who think he'll be the nominee worry about whether he can generate the intensity required to beat the Democratic incumbent.
These party leaders and activists, from the states voting Feb. 28 and the most contested ones ahead in the fall, say Romney has made strides toward addressing this problem. But, they say, he needs to do more to convince the Republican base that he's running to fundamentally reverse the nation's course, not simply manage what they see as the federal government's mess.
What it adds up to: A lot of smiles for Team Obama. So far.